


A light for the lost and the meek

by msflyk



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: A bit gore maybe?, Bullying, Chasing, Creepy, Death, Dolls, Gen, Hysteria, I'm bad when it comes to choose the tags, Illnesses, Minor Character Death, No Romance, No Sex, Outliers (Transformers), Panic, Singing, Stories from the past, Tarn City, Violence, doll maker, good intentions and bad manners, horror...ish?, no couples, poor Damus, this ain't the way to deal with a mech in shock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:49:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26101441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/msflyk/pseuds/msflyk
Summary: "They had found him, he had to flee.Cursing the dull orange color of his armour, damn easy to spot, Damus began to run again, with the sensation of being swallowed up by the walls of those tunnels barely illuminated by intermittent white lights, capable of only dimly spreading a sinister light over the rusty pipes that ran between the walls."You're slow, outlier! You'd better stop, let us beat the crap out of you and go get a new helm and pliers from the Senate!" shouted one of the two pursuers."
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	A light for the lost and the meek

**Author's Note:**

> Stupid but not short oneshot about our poor Damus. Since I'm a non-native english speaker and writer (i'm Italian), probably (surely) there are some mistakes. I began to translate my stories only recently, I'm trying to do my best and improve. Hope you appreciate my attempt(s) :)  
> The song you will find inside is this one, 
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K59y5tPK_cU
> 
> I suggest you listen to it before or after reading :)

_.: Indefinite eons in the past :._

  
  
  
  
  
  


The noise produced by his desperate rush was the one that came most clearly to his audios, already deafened by the pouring rain of that unfortunate evening.

He slipped into the first dark alley he saw, crouching among the garbage and hoping not to be found.

"I didn't want to, I didn't do it on purpose. I didn't want to deactivate his arm, _I swear_ " thought Damus, terrified, while his orange body was shaking.

That evening he was on the derelict outskirts of the city known as "Tarn". He lived in a quieter part of the city, but he had to go in those areas for work -loading and unloading certain goods. Damus was just trying to get home when he was attacked by two complete strangers who had tried to rob him.

It wasn't the first time that scumbags as those had been all over him. Sometimes Damus had the impression that he was walking around with a sign that said "I'm a mild-mannered person who can't fight, attack me freely, thank you!" attached on his forehead.

"I'm on my own, I keep my head down and go my own way, why is this happening to me? I hadn't done anything to those people, I didn't do anything bad to anybody...I couldn't even if I wanted to, and in any case I don't want to _..._ ".

The thought clashed with the wave of anger that he had felt when the two mechs who had attacked him had almost ripped the package from his hands. What he had felt in that moment was the opposite of "I don't want to hurt anyone": at that moment he had ardently wished to have the power to rebel against the umpteenth abuse.

Such desires, however, were dangerous, at least in his case, because he actually _had_ a particular ability. He was born with the gift - “The curse”, he thought - of being able to "turn off" other people's machines and body parts, but doing so caused him pain and, moreover, was not strong enough to be useful, perhaps because he could not try to develop it.

That ability that had nothing to do with his physical structure and made him an outlier, and outliers as such were wanted by the Senate, so it was essential to hide it _and himself_ from everything, from everyone, always.

"Where did that afthole go?! We can't let him get away from us, handing him over to the Senate could be worth quite a chunk of shanix!"

And hiding was precisely what he had failed to do that evening, having paralyzed the arm of one of the two assailants who were now hunting him.

"Do you think I don't know that, ya idiot?... _Ha!_ Here he is!"

They had found him, he had to flee.

Cursing the dull orange color of his armour, damn easy to spot, Damus began to run again, with the sensation of being swallowed up by the walls of those tunnels barely illuminated by intermittent white lights, capable of only dimly spreading a sinister light over the rusty pipes that ran between the walls.

"You're slow, outlier! You'd better stop, let us beat the crap out of you and go get a new helm and pliers from the Senate!" shouted one of the two pursuers.

Panicking, Damus realized he had taken the wrong road and slipped into a dead-end alley. He saw the only possible salvation in the already half rusty metal door that he managed to knock down with a violent shovel, and shoved himself into what turned out to be an abandoned warehouse of...fuel? Yes, “fuel” what the faded inscription on the containers he had around him said. He tried to hide among them, unfortunately without much success.

That place, however, could not shelter him neither from the rain -which kept beating hard on him from the half-broken roof- nor from his hunters.

"It's over. We told you: you should have given up!" the two of them grinned.

"I-I didn't do anything, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to...I-I was just passing by, I-I didn't...I didn't do anything" was all that Damus could say, "I-I didn't do _anything_...".

"Too bad that we "d-do n-not" care at all, uh?" mocked one, approaching "And that you "will pass" into the hands of the Senate. Not that you’ll change much with the empurata, you are a useless wretched waste already".

"Not completely useless, they will pay us for this loathsome piece of scrap" said the other, a hand stretched out to grab Damus "They will pay us well and-"

_"Come, wayward souls_

_And wander through the darkness..."_

A quiet and delicate female voice, but just as clear in intoning that sad song, led everyone to look up without being able to see anything useful.

"Who's there?!" cried one of the two robbers, unsuccessfully trying to spot the femme.

Or whatever was singing.

_"There is a light, for the lost and the meek..."._

The voice seemed to move around them, ever closer in a downward spiral, and both the two attackers and Damus began to be more than unquiet.

Perhaps because they had remembered one of the many rumors about monsters that went around in those godsforsaken places.

_"Sorrow and fear are easily forgotten_

_When you submit to the soil of the earth..."_

As the two continued to look around, Damus saw their death coming.

The endings of two metal cables, as thin as his index finger, began to wrap around their throats without yet touching the delicate cables of their necks, looking for a weak spot in which to penetrate.

_"Grow, tiny seed_

_You are called to the trees..."_

And them found that.

The metal cables became four and made their way into the neck, arriving in the chassis and coming out of their throat just as the roots of certain techno-organic plants would have done.

His now former attackers wheezed, terrified and hopeless, while two more cables broke one of their optics and, passing from the inside, emerged from the next one.

  
  


_"Rise till your leaves fill the sky..."_

More dead than alive, the mechs were lifted off the ground and swayed slightly as if they were puppets.

In all this, Damus had not been able to move. He couldn't divert his optics from that horrible, macabre, obscene, frightening spectacle. 

Frightening almost like the sense of _satisfaction_ that he had felt for a few moments and had immediately suffocated.

_"Until your sighs fill the air in the night..."_

The cables that had torn the thugs’ optics came out of their helms and caressed the fuel containers.

Only then Damus did finally start to collect himself, to back out, reacting to the terror that had blocked him up until that moment.

_"Lift your mighty limbs..."_

  
  


And finally, after having looked up and seen a monster -a monster with only one yellow eye- who was dangling upside down from the metal beams and broken ceiling pipe, Damus ran away with an atrocious scream almost resembling the wailing of a wounded animal.

_"And give praise to the fire"._

The last line of that dark song reached his audios anyway, as did the heat of the flames, but he could not have cared less at that moment. 

He just wanted to get away from that place and reach another one, any one, _a safe one_ , he just wanted to get out of his mind what had happened, to forget those roots-like cables, the suffocated and desperate rales and sounds of terror, the optics pushed out of their orbits rolling on the wet floor, that voice in his processor that said _"They deserved it"_.

Damus couldn't say how long he ran and how far he went, he didn't realize it, just like he didn't realize he had started crying, sobbing as he cursed himself for being born that way, outlier and weak. He only slowed down the race when the tiredness began to be felt more than the horror and shock, still present and still throbbing in his point one percenter sea green Spark, and his legs began to tremble hard.

He still felt in danger, his vents began to give him the impression that he could collapse and suffocate at any moment. He was about to collapse on his knees when his optics, in all that darkness, saw the powerful light of a lantern through a glass panel: the window of a store, on the entrance of which there was a yellowish sign saying "open".

His legs moved by themselves towards what his processor had classified as a "safe place". The fast but uncertain steps almost tripped him more than once, but he finally managed to reach his destination, snapping the door open just before his legs gave out, knocking him to his knees and forcing him to crawl to a corner. Then, Damus took his helm in his hands and closed his optics, desperately trying to get his vents working again.

Minutes became hours, the concept of "time" lost its meaning for Damus, trapped in a tangle of emotions that he was not able to deal with.

When he finally managed to regain some self-control and raised his eyes, he jumped backwards and bumped into a box whose contents - reels of fabric threads - spilled onto the floor.

"W-who are you?! What is..."

The person sitting on a sofa next to him, a blue and magenta coloured femme with yellow optics, remained motionless and silent.

"She’s not anything anymore, and I'm her poor other half. Even less so".

Damus turned left, in the direction of the voice that he had heard, remaining speechless for a few moments. It was a femme, or rather, what was left of a femme that must have suffered a terrible accident or have been the victim of a very serious illness.

Her left arm was colored in blue and magenta like that of the "other" -the one still sitting next to him- as well as part of her chassis and a small part of her pelvis. Mutilated, legless, she sat next to a work table, intent on assembling white doll parts terribly similar to those that completed the missing parts of her body. Not even her faceplate had been spared, Damus noticed: the only "living" part was the one around the right optic, with its pleasantly golden color, and the optical ridge. The twelve metal cables that she had on her head were braided in an elegant way, and fell along her back all the way to the floor.

"But you don't have to be afraid of her, she's just a doll. It's my job: making dolls in this valley of tears that known as Tarn" said the femme, with her mouth half-open and motionless and _disturbing_ "I don't know how to do anything else, but it's honest work and I live from that. Some people are deader than I am. Like you, for example".

"I-I, I am fine. I-I'm… I'm ok. Yes", Damus muttered, trying to quickly put the reels back into the box. His shaky hands didn't help him much.

"I can see that," replied the other, "You just dropped seven of the eight spools you wanted to put back".

"To hell with it!" shouted Damus, knocking the box to the ground and stiffening himself immediately afterwards "N-no, I... I'm sorry. I-I didn't have to do that, it's-it's just that… that before, I… it happened that..." he tried to calm himself down, feeling a new principle of hyperventilation "N-nothing. Nothing. I just tripped and fell into your store. It was open..."

"Three and a half hours ago."

Damus grazed his blue optics, then he squeezed his shoulders. "T-three and a half hours ago?..."

"Yeah. And the store is closed," said the femme, pointing to the thick metal shutter that covered the entrance and the window. "But I'd say it's better that way. There are bad people walking around, you know?”

"Yeah… bad people" muttered the mech, lowering his gaze. He made a brief pause for silence. "Thank you for… for n-not having kicked me out".

"Would have been pretty hard for me to do so, you're not precisely a tiny one, so I would have needed a hand. Literally” added “Well… your designation?"

"W-wha..."

"What is your designation? What's your name?"

"D-Damus," he replied.

"With one 'd' or two?" asked the femme, scratching her chin with her remaining hand.

"O-one" murmured the orange mech.

"My name is Scylla. Sit on the couch next to her” she said, pointing at the doll ''Otherwise you'll collapse again".

The idea of sitting next to that extremely realistic doll was very disturbing to Damus, but he did not object. "Why do you say that she… that you… why did you say you're 'her poor half'?"

"Her poor half and even less, thinking that I am now without legs. I was beautiful once, wasn't I?"

Without waiting for an answer, because she evidently didn't care, Scylla and her wheeled chair disappeared behind a booth with floral motifs.

Left alone, Damus examined the doll next to him. It had been made of a material different from metal but painted in such a way as to look like it. If once Scylla's appearance had been that, as her remaining body parts actually suggested, then she had been beautiful just as she had claimed.

He looked around. He was not in the mood to notice it before, but that place was really overflowing with dolls of all shapes and sizes and materials of many kinds. Some dolls were even hanging from the ceiling, curiously full of hooks as well as exposed beams. More than one doll was dressed in beautiful clothes as he had seen only in video broadcasts about the nobility of Cybertron. In spite of this, he could not get rid of an anxiety that kept prodding him every time his optics met with the dead eyes of Scylla's creations.

"It's said that the dolls, as lifeless beings, desire a soul and try to take for themselves a piece of it every time someone looks into their eyes. That's why there are people who are afraid of them," said Scylla, still on the other side of the booth. "What do you think?”

"They are... they're only dolls. They can't take anything away from me," replied Damus, "They can't do _anything_ to me".

His gaze fell again on Scylla's doppelgänger doll. He was not so sure anymore about what he had said.

He felt a tap on his right servo. "High Grade energon, I think you need it".

"Thank you," said Damus -without turning around, his attention still caught by the doll- drinking a few sips.

"Ah, there's also this. It fell out of your hands before".

Damus' hands held something familiar: a package, to be precise the one he had in his hands before being attacked, and which he had lost when his attackers had almost caught him in the fuel warehouse.

"Thank you! If tomorrow afternoon I had not brought it to work..."

_In the fuel warehouse._

The same one where those two delinquents were terminated and to which the fire had been set.

"...I would have been in trouble" said the mech, with his voice lowered and thinned. He felt the energon freezing in his fuel lines while he realized that something was wrong.

He felt the presence of something next to his left audio receptor.

_"Lift your mighty limbs/ And give praise to the fire..."_

Panic: the only feeling that controlled Damus from that moment on, having recognized the voice and the song he had heard three hours earlier.

He jumped forward, tried to break through the front door and the window without succeeding - they were both unbreakable - and then, without understanding what he was doing, he grabbed the first thing that had happened to him in his hands - a broom - and then brandished it against the femme.

"S-STAY AWAY FROM ME! Don't kill me! D-Don't try to kill me, I have a..." looked at the broom, "I have a broom! I-I-I have a..."

He muttered and squeezed the broom so hard that it broke in his hand.

Scylla was "standing", she was moving slowly and inexorably towards him dangling from the beams, thanks to two of the metal cables that until just before were braided.

"Yes, it was my broom. Now I need a new one," said the femme, with her half-open and motionless doll mouth, "But it was worth it. If you could see your face now!" she exclaimed, and laughed. Such monstrous spectacle, it was. "I've always loved scaring people, but since I've been like this I've been able to do it with such ease that my jaw fell off. Whops" she added, when the jaw broke off and fell into her sole healthy hand.

"Y-y-you..." stammered Damus "You..."

"Don't start hyperventilating again, outlier named Damus. You dropped the package again".

"It was you!" exclaimed the mech, "You have them... you have them..."

"Killed, preventing them from bringing you to the Senate. Yes".

Damus, understandably frightened, felt that his legs were about to give way again. "But you… you don't even have legs, you just have..."

"My ‘hair’, and it’s lucky that I still have them. The disease has left me with half of my body, or rather less, but thanks to my hair I can still go to the toilet alone and take night walks" she knitted her only optical ridge in a thoughtful expression "Are they called walks even if I don't have feet to walk? Or are they called in another way like... ‘hangings’? ‘Climbings’? Right, I guess I’ll use walks’, it’s simpler".

"Byor Primus’ sake" whispered Damus, on the verge of a nervous breakdown “by Primus’-"

"He died of shame a long time ago".

"You killed them...in that manner!»

"You're welcome. The likes as us should stick together".

Pure confusion appeared in the terrified optics of the poor orange mech. "T-the likes as "us"?!" 

"Outliers".

Hearing Scylla say this made the surprise overcome the fear for a few moments. "You are not an outlier. If you were, you wouldn't say it so easily to a stranger, considering what happens to us outliers if... if they discover us".

"It seems to me that you are the last one who is interested in talking about outliers to anyone. Why don't you sit down again? There are much worse things out there than a serious invalid," Scylla pointed out to him, putting her jaw back in place.

Damus hesitated quite a bit but finally, realizing he had no choice, he went back to sit down. He did not avert his eyes from her for a moment, not even when he saw Scylla wearing one of her dolls' rich dresses.

"It is one of my favorites," she said.

The mech remained silent.

"I was out for one of my night walks when I saw those two chasing you and I heard them calling you ‘outlier’, Damus" she began to tell "I was in the dead end alley that you took. I thought that the Universe could do even without that scrap, and that they were weak enough for me to deal with. You could have done it yourself, honestly: maybe you are not a professional fighter, but they were much less robust than you".

"I can't," murmured Damus, "I-I can't do it, and anyway... and anyway I don't have to attract attention. If you really are an outlier, you know why".

"Not attracting attention doesn't mean going around looking like "please, beat the crap out of me and steal my armor too". We are in the suburbs of Tarn, not in the center of Crystal City," Scylla reminded him. "And if it’s true that what happened ain’t your fault and that a person should be able to walk around quietly regardless, it is not like that and will never be. If you don't learn how to react, you'll end up badly someday".

"I don't have murder hair" mumbled Damus, his optics lowered down, "You do".

"I have barely half a body, too”.

Silence.

"What is your outlier's gift, Damus?"

"I turn off machines and paralyze people's body parts," he said, after hesitation, "but it hurts me if I do it. I wouldn't call it a gift, no”.

Scylla raised her optic to the ceiling. That one healthy part of her faceplate was damn expressive. "Have you ever considered using it to defend yourself?"

"I can't attract attention, I told you”.

"There won’t always be someone to protect you all the time. If what happened earlier will happen again and you’ll not fight back, you’ll get caught… and you know the consequences” Scylla said “However, my ability as an outlier is to see how a person will look like in the future”.

"Then you were lying, as I thought! It's not something that has a scientific basis, it was just talk!"

"I thought so too when I looked in the mirror, I used it to go on a few vorn and saw myself in these conditions. I didn’t believe what I saw" she shrugged, as much as she could "Now I have changed my mind".

"You...you want to keep me here, don't you? When you went over there, you called someone who is going to come and get me soon, didn't you?! You want to sell me to the Senate so you’ll be paid and you’ll have new legs, right?!"

Damus' state of mind continued to be very tense and dangerously prone to hysteria, but it was understandable after what had happened and considering where, and with whom, he was.

"Eventually I would prefer a new valve, the disease took it away along with any desire for interface. By now I have forgotten what it feels like to make one. Nothing serious, anyway".

"You want to hurt me! I know it!" exclaimed the mech, without even listening to her, "You have finished those two so as not to have to share the loot! You have-"

The slap he received made him stand still for a few nanoclicks.

"Shock therapy" sentenced the femme, resting her left hand on the slightly bruised cheek of the mech "Are you really so scared of someone without an arm and without legs, Damus?

"Maybe. A little bit".

Scylla nodded. "I'm glad to hear that".

"What?!"

She raised her optical ridge. "What?"

"You...n-nothing. Nothing..." he mumbled, and squinting at her with more a little distrust.

The femme’s hand rested on his shoulder. "Joking aside, I won't do anything to you and I would never sell a fellow outlier. I don't know if your work will bring you around here any other time, but know that this will always be a safe place for you... _maybe!_ " she exclaimed, as she snapped close to Damus with the metal cables lifted in an attack pose and laughed with gusto when he, in order to jerk off, knocked his helm against the wall.

"Go to Inferno! You've got problems, ok?!" Damus blurted out, "You've got _big_ problems, and although you're just a pathetic mutilated thing who crawls back and forth, physical ones are not the worst ones!

"And what so?"

Damus muttered, both for he had just realized the wickedness of what he had said, and because Scylla didn't care about it. "M-I'm sorry. I lost… I lost control. I'm sorry".

"I've been scaring you on purpose since before, and you apologize for having said the obvious? You really are a goner. I hope that sooner or later you’ll finally wake up" she sighed "Here’s your package".

"Wha... oh. Thank you," said Damus, taking his package from one of Scylla's metal cables.

The femme, hooking herself to the ceiling beams and pipes, moved away. "Tomorrow morning when I’ll reopen the store, you can leave. In the meantime, recharge your batteries, I've scared you enough for today. What I told you about this being a safe place remains valid".

"Wait”.

Scylla stopped.

"You said that you can see the future appearance of people. Could you..." Damus hesitated "Could you see what mine will look like?"

La femme looked at him for a long time.

"Oh" he said, in a very uninspiring way "Oh! That’s better" she exclaimed then, in a much more relieved tone "Having a valve still functional I would have gladly had a booty call with you in the future".

"Is that all? You won’t say anything else!?"

"It wouldn't help to avoid what awaits you".

"You were lying," said Damus. "You are not an outlier and you don't have that power”.

"If -or when- we’ll meet again in the future, when you’ll have that hot appearance I was talking about, I’ll give you a little doll of yourself. At that point you will be able to tell me whether I was lying or not. Deal?"

"Yes. Of course. Sure," sighed Damus, beginning to feel very tired.

"Tomorrow morning you’ll also be able to choose your seventy-five shanix doll," said Scylla, "I left you twenty-five of them, you never know what may happen, right?”

"W-what...you stole seventy-five shainx from me?! While I was lying in the corner in shock, perhaps?!"

"It's not a theft: it's a self-payment with the forced sale of a doll attached," replied Scylla, without denying the moment in which the theft had taken place.

"Scylla!... she’s gone," mumbled Damus, seeing her disappear behind the booth.

The weariness was such that Damus did not even want to get angry. He only wished to wake up in his own berth, discovering that everything he had experienced that night had been a horrible nightmare.

_"Come, wayward souls_

_And wander through the darkness... "_

  
  


"Kill me in the morning," the mech said aloud. "I’m too tired even to scream in fear”.

"Ah, yes, that's true. I'm so used to singing it that I haven't thought about it. It was my carrier's favorite" said Scylla from behind the booth.

"Really?"

"No. My sire composed it".

"Is that true, at least?" insisted Damus, without real interest and the optics about to close.

"No. Tell me, do you like music, Damus?"

"Yes, above all...Eucryphia’s Empyrean Suite," he murmured, before closing his eyelids and slipping to recharge.

The next morning, that orange mech that would become _Tarn_ -the dreaded leader of the DJD, the most fervent loyalist of Megatron and the Decepticon doctrine- left the shop with a seventy-five shanix doll that Scylla saids he had modeled on the features of a noblewoman from Iacon: it was white and serenity colored, with blue optics, golden decorations on the body and faceplate, and a pastel pink dress.

The work that had been assigned to Damus took him to those suburbs many other times, and almost every one of them he returned to Scylla's store, realizing that it was really a safe place for him... even though he still thought that Scylla had some big problems in her keeping to try to scare him - which in she succeeded every time.

The words of that femme, "There won’t always be someone to protect you all the time. If what happened earlier will happen again and you’ll not fight back, you’ll get caught… and you know the consequences", unfortunately turned out to be prophetic a few vorn later. Damus's path crossed with that of the Senate and he was subjected to empurata. Although he imagined that Scylla would have no problem with his new condition, he never managed to show up again in her store - not in such a condition.

From the moment, his descent began... or ascent, depending on the point of view. The mech that he later became had very little in common with Damus, the outlier who didn't want to attract attention and didn't know how to react to those who were after him...

Or so he liked to think.

_.: The present :._

  
  
  
  
  


That walk in the outskirtss of Tarn was also a walk in the avenue of memories for... Tarn.

It was quite ironic that now his name was that of the city where he was born and raised.

"It's even raining," he thought.

At one time he would have felt frightened and tense walking in those dark alleys that had undergone relatively few changes compared to eons ago, despite the war. Now, instead, he felt nothing but total tranquility and... a little bit of satisfaction, just a little bit, to see bigger mechs than him running away frightened.

He and his team had gone to that city to delete a name from the List and, having done their duty, he had felt the desire to take a walk alone. His men and Nickel, though unaware of his past, had no problems or questions about it.

He even started humming the Empyrean Suite with his mouth closed, letting himself be carried away by his feet in streets well known to him, when he noticed that he had arrived at a familiar intersection.

The tranquility he had felt up to that moment disappeared, giving way to two impulses that were contrasting in a nerve-wracking way.

He had not seen Scylla for a very long time, he didn’t even know if she was online, if she was dead, if she was still there or if she had gone to live somewhere else. Remembering that he hadn't shown up since the empurata, he didn't even know how he would feel when he saw his store... or or what was left of it.

Then he remembered that insecurity was not part of his new self, so decided to move on.

"The building is still standing" he noticed after a while, realizing with annoyance that he was rhythmically contracting his digits due to the tension.

He arrived at his destination. In the window there was still the lantern surrounded by dolls and on the entrance there was still the familiar luminous and yellowish writing that read "open": it meant that Scylla was still there, now as in the past.

What would he have told her? How would she have answered him?

Then he remembered: no one, except Megatron, Shockwave and himself, knew who he had been in the past, and by now he was so different from then that not even his own carrier would have recognized him, if she had been online. He could enter, pretend he wanted to take a look at the dolls - he still had the one of that evening, was placed in his private quarters - and leave.

He took courage and opened the door.

  
  


_"Come, wayward souls_

_And wander through the darkness_

_There is a light, for the lost and the meek... "_

They said that the past was past, and meant nothing.

Those who dared to tell such a lie, perhaps hadn’t one worthy of any importance.

_"Sorrow and fear are easily forgotten_

_When you submit to the soil of the earth._

_Grow, tiny seed_

_You are called to the trees_

_Rise till your leaves fill the sky_

_Until your sighs fill the air in the night..._

_Lift your mighty limbs..."_

  
  


A thought crossed Tarn's processor: everything was the same, including Scylla's voice, and at the same time all was different from then, because he had grown just like the techno-organic tree of that song.

_"And give praise to the fire"._

She was behind the booth, always the same one with the floral motifs, and Tarn saw her come out on her wheeled chair to show herself to the new client.

He was about to greet her as courtesy dictates, but he didn't have the time.

"As I said: having a functional valve, now I would ask you to give me that interface I was talking about vorn ago. Better late than never, Damus," said the femme "The way you showed up here after a silence that lasted eons, despite having my private contact, makes me wonder so much that my arms are falling off" and in fact her doll-like right arm fell "Whops".

"It was true, then. That evening you had _indeed_ seen my future appearance" said Tarn, slowly approaching her "Empurata included".

"It was you who didn't listen to me when I warned you that you would end up badly, with the attitude you had" replied the femme, pulling herself up thanks to the "hair" hooked to the ceiling "Even if you ended up badly only for a while".

He didn't say anything or move when Scylla, like that night of eons ago, placed herhealthy hand on his faceplate - now covered by the iconic mask.

"Do I still scare you, Damus?"

"Not at all”.

Scylla nodded. Her only optic seemed happy. "I'm glad to hear it".

One of the metal cables handed Tarn a box, which the Decepticon opened without hesitation.

"Your doll. I promised it to you, remember?"

A scale reproduction of its current appearance, extremely faithful to the original.

The last remnants of doubt he had vanished completely, and he felt conflicting emotions that were driving him to want to leave in a hurry.

"Of course".

"Now I can die in peace," sighed the femme, in an increasingly thinner voice, "I kept my word. Farewell, Damus".

" _What-_ "

Scylla lost his grip on the beams and fell to the ground like a dead body, or an inanimate doll like the ones she created.

After a few seconds of astonishment, Tarn bent down quickly, pulled her up and began to shake her slightly, forgetting any notion of first aid.

"Scylla! What's the matter with you? Say something! React!" he shook her again, "Her body is cold, what if..."

She was offline.

She had gone offline suddenly, not exactly in his arms but almost; it was not what Tarn would have wanted, and it was as far from what he had foreseen. Maybe her disease had continued to advance? It seemed to make sense, after all, over the vorn he never showed up, so he hadn’t asked her about her condition. He should have done so. Maybe he would have-

The dead femme, who was evidently not so dead, jumped forward with a shrill cry, and Tarn, after an exclamation of surprise -and a little scare- threw her away.

"You should have seen your face!" laughed Scylla, that wretch, with gusto.

"I'm leaving. I'm leaving before I finish you off as you would have deserved a long time ago!" said Tarn, hard, reaching the door in great strides.

"While you're at it, can you tell Tesarus that his doll will be ready in a few days and will be shipped soon?...your soldier has found my site on the net, yes sir", added Scylla, seeing the astonishment in Tarn's optics. "Yes, I know he's your soldier. Yes, I also know your present name. I recognized you as soon as I looked at an image of you, having seen you in the past".

"I guess I don't have to be surprised. Who surprises me more is Tesarus, I didn't think he was interested in dolls".

"Sex dolls".

"Ah. Yes. Well. Farewell" concluded Tarn, crossing the threshold.

It wasn't a real farewell, he knew that sooner or later he would end up going back there for some reason. Certain elements of the past never changed, but there was not even a real desire to let them go, and that store with that lantern and that wretch of a femme, was right among those elements.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Well, if there's someone who had the patience to read everything: thanks.  
> Here there are some of my drawings of Scylla (and her family) before and after her disease. There are two drawings of a humanized version of her too. 
> 
> **Scylla**
> 
> http://fav.me/dds71lw
> 
> http://fav.me/ddr20vw
> 
> http://fav.me/ddsdkag
> 
> http://fav.me/ddta34p
> 
> http://fav.me/de1q471
> 
> http://fav.me/de2603l
> 
> http://fav.me/de2pbdc
> 
> **Humanized Scylla**
> 
> http://fav.me/ddrvc5y
> 
> http://fav.me/ddrxyw7
> 
> **Scylla's family (...all offline :'D)**
> 
> http://fav.me/ddygt8z
> 
> http://fav.me/ddwtfrg


End file.
